My Time In Prison

A Little Background To My Sentence

My Crime? I was made redundant around the turn of the millennium. I got a small redundancy payment and tried to get by on that but it didn’t last all that long as I had just bought a house and had a mortgage to pay so needed to find some way of keeping my head above the financial waterline. What was I going to do?

In The Car Park

I looked at the high white wire fences and wondered what was going to happen as I was taken in through the secure entrance area and gave my details. I was then led to the cell I would be kept in while I was here.

Actually, this was a three-month IT contract redesigning their intranet but some of the stuff that happened while I was there was on the verge of unbelievable, and that is the point of this article and story.

The prison was for violent psychiatric prisoners so not exactly the sort of place you want to be if you don’t have to.

At this time I had just started to use a mobile phone and at the start of the week I drive from home to the Prison on a two-hour road trip from Newcastle to somewhere in Scotland, and though a train line ran through the nearest village I needed to have a car, so I hired one and paid by cheque. Remember those days?

You Need Somewhere To Sleep

I found a pub and booked in, but didn’t stay long as the bedroom was infested with fleas. That night I slept in the car, then found a farmhouse which did bed breakfast and evening meals and was excellent while I stayed there.

This was before we had even adequate phone cameras, but I stopped at a local village and saw the poster which you can see as the main image. I told friends about this and they said yeah that place is real’ I am not sure if they are still going as this is the only place I could find about the Tarbrax Woolfords And Auchengray Theatrical Society

In Prison

I was in an office with six other people, the database admin guy was a spiteful idiot who had nearly hospitalised one of the girls who was working there when he threw a book at her head. She was OK and could look after herself, but I told her if she wanted a witness I would be there for her. I don’t think he was an inmate but he was a total incompetent, who refused to accept any responsibility and would never restart the system when I said it needed it.

Another thing is that the “canteen” was in the inner secure unit and going for a bacon sandwich was dangerous as inmates kept escaping from their confinements, luckily not of them came near me, but a trip to Greggs (ubiquitous UK fast food company) is seldom that dangerous.

Induction

I was taken through how dangerous this place could be, and how paper plates and the like could be tightly rolled up and made into vicious stabby things. I thought that was quite interesting, but was shocked at the next piece of incredible incompetence,

They asked if we could check videocassettes, CDs and DVDs that were brought in for inmates for porn. They were letting the inmates have free access to CDs and DVDs, these were potentially violent people.

I pointed out that if you break a CD or DVD you get a very sharp lethal weapon, far more dangerous than a knife made from paper. The reply I was given was that they need to have a choice of entertainment, still oblivious to the apparent danger.

When I came out of that induction I was even warier of going for a breakfast bacon sandwich.

An Argument

They were impressed with the system I had designed and some high cost consultants on another system saw it as perfect for something they were doing and could I teach them how to do it. I knew these "experts" were being paid ten times what I was, so I said I would help them if the Prison paid me what they were getting. The Prison authorities refused and said I was costing them £5,000 a week because these "experts" could not find a solution.

We came to an impasse and I handed in my notice and was glad to get out.

I certainly slept more soundly after that.